[354]. In practice, though not always in theory: for his famous explanation of his Christabel metre is admitted, even by an authority who takes such different views of prosody from mine as Mr Robert Bridges, to be quite wrong.
[355]. I have, since this was written, endeavoured to do something of the kind for a practical purpose (to which nothing is sacred) in my Loci Critici (London and Boston, Mass., 1903), pp. 303-365.
[356]. Or, as he puts it in one of the great critical phrases of the world, “to produce that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.” It derives of course from Aristotle, but the advance on the original is immense.
[357]. “And from all other species having this object in common with it, it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.” This is the dialect of “Cimmerian Lodge” with a vengeance! An attempt to expound it will be found in the abstract of the Lectures of 1811 given by J. P. Collier: but it sheds little light. And simpler Estesian definitions elsewhere—“Prose is words in good order: poetry the best words in the best order,” &c.—labour likewise under the common curse that Poetry escapes them. What better words in what better order than the Lord’s Prayer? Is that poetry?
[358]. The extraordinary critical genius of Coleridge can hardly be better shown than by his gloss here on the Petronian enigma, Præcipitandus est liber spiritus, to which we have referred so often. The poet—the image is not Coleridge’s, but I think it very fairly illustrates his view—rides the reader’s own genius, and both together attain the goal.
[359]. This (chap. xvi., not long after the beginning (p. 157, ed. Bohn)) is the reference cited above, i. 419, note. It is very slight, and merely concerns Dante’s jealousy for his mother tongue.
[360]. These terms are used with no offensive intention, but in strict reference to the matter of the poems.
[361]. Chap. xx. sub fin., p. 201, ed. cit.
[362]. Except, once more, to my friend Mr Raleigh.
[363]. Chap. xxi. Personality, partisanship, haphazard, garbling, caricature in selection of instances, are the chief faults that Coleridge finds with both Edinburgh and Quarterly. The reply is dignified in tone and not unjust; but, like other things of the same kind, it illustrates certain permanent weaknesses of human nature. All the faults, I think, which Coleridge finds with “Blue and Yellow” and “Buff” reviewing might be found with his own critique of Maturin’s Bertram, printed in this very volume. All these faults certainly found by every generation of authors with their critics, even when these authors happen to have been copious and constant writers of criticism themselves. Always is the author tempted, like Mr Baxter, to cry, “Ah, but I was in the right, and these men are dreadfully in the wrong”; always does he think, like the Archbishop of Granada, that the incriminated part of his sermon is exactly the best part; always, when he bewails the absence of the just and impartial critics of other times, does he forget the wise ejaculation of Mr Rigmarole, “Pretty much like our own, I fancy!” (There is no mental reservation in these remarks.)